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Our criminal approach to law and order  -  SMH  -  January 27, 2003  ptotaro@smh.com.au   Ms. Paola Totaro

During the '80s when Jeff Kennett was desperate to win an election in Victoria, he paid regular visits to Henry Bolte, the enormously successful Liberal premier of that state for more than 17 years. Kennett reported that Bolte, infuriated by the Victorian Liberal Party's repeated failures at the ballot box, offered the then opposition leader some political advice: if you want to win an election, have a hanging, he said.

In 1967, Bolte had done just that when he authorised the hanging of Ronald Ryan, convicted of murdering a prison warder. Ryan's was to be the last hanging in Australia after the vocal anti-capital punishment campaigners finally won the day. But Bolte still won his election.

Four decades later, one could be forgiven for believing that in NSW, the leaders of both major political parties subscribe to the same primitive and fundamentally uncivilised beliefs about the nature of politics, about crime and punishment, and law and order.

In NSW, despite a contemplative and intelligent Labor premier and a broad-minded and self-proclaimed left-of-centre, new Liberal opposition leader, the criminal justice system is being reshaped and reformed to conform with what these two leaders tell us "the community wants". But how do they know what that is? Is party polling accurate? Are opinion polls on and public perceptions of crime designed around peer-reviewed and best-practice guidelines? Are radio talkback or TV vox pops accurate tools to gauge public sentiment? The answer in NSW must be a resounding no.

In NSW, political rhetoric and commitment to the principles of "evidence-based reform" only ever emerge when it is electorally expedient. During the controversial debate about a medically supervised heroin-injecting room, the State Government used the words "evidence-based" ad nauseum to justify the radical trial of a new drug treatment. Its commitment to evaluating a new approach to the drug war before adopting it fully should be congratulated. But why, then, are there no similar, properly evaluated studies to measure the efficacy of equally radical proposals such as mandatory sentencing? 

Academic literature showing that people over-estimate the leniency of the penal system, believing that parole rates are too high and imprisonment rates too low, abounds.

The media, of course, aids and abets in this process. Too often the public is encouraged to make comparisons between the sentences handed down for particularly sensational crimes without access to sentencing patterns which provide context and a far more accurate sense of the system.

But our politicians have not responded by trying to educate the constituency on the complexities of the legal and criminal justice system. A commitment in this area would require them to engage in a complex, continuing discourse, one needing exceptional leadership, patience, attention to detail and a whole lot more than a 30-second sound grab.

It would require more intellectual muscle than appointing a new police commissioner who pledged to measure his performance on, among other things, "improving perceptions of crime", as the NSW Police Minister, Michael Costa, did last year.

Instead, year after year, NSW voters are told that their political leaders will "fix" the crime problem by dramatically altering the penal justice system in response to public concerns.

Our political leaders do not explain how they translated the public's often justifiable fears about personal safety or crime rates into a demand for expensive, untested policies that, to date, have done absolutely nothing to pre-empt or curb crime - and even less to rehabilitate or educate offenders before release. Rather, the law and order auction that began with Nick Greiner's 1988 "truth in sentencing" legislation and continues today with mandatory sentencing has simply added to our already bursting jails. Let's face it: there is no nation or politician on earth immune to the perennial problem posed by crime.

But how we respond to it says much about what kind of society we are.

Spending half a billion dollars a year on prisons but earmarking a tiny proportion of that to educating or rehabilitating the souls inside - if only to protect those outside when they are finally released - suggests that our priorities may need reordering.

Public health campaigns are scientifically evaluated before millions of dollars in taxpayer funds are poured into them. Education policies are constantly measured, monitored and their success rates reported. Governments do their best to ensure that the millions they allocate to the acquisition of new defence capabilities will deliver success.

It is time that voters demanded that their political leaders afforded the same importance to the criminal justice system. Proper evaluation research on such reforms should be mandatory.

Anything less is criminal.